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Current Affairs 2006 - Top Rated (13 items)
| Dec 14, 2006 | Canadian Weed Board Will Need A Bigger Cafeteria Eureka! Get this: The Canadian Weed Board.
Eh? Eh?
The column is now open for questions.
Yes, you, Q, you have a question?
Q: Just five. What? Why? Where? When? And, in particular, insofar as it certainly bears repeating: WHAT?!
A: Exactly as stated. Parliament passes legislation not to abolish, not to weaken, but to preserve forever the Canadian Wheat Board, on two conditions: 1 ) instead of a soft "Wh..." and an "...e-t," a hard "W.." and an "...e-d," a virtual homonym, and 2 ) instead of selling grain, the marketing monopoly moves exclusively into cannabis, marijuana, goof grass, spliff, mary jane, dope, jazzleaf. Everybody wins. The Canadian Whe..er, Weed Board gets to keeps its existence as a 500-employee federal bureaucracy. Farmers, released from historic board restrictions and obligations, gain the freedom to sell their grain to anybody at any time.
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| Dec 6, 2006 | RCMP Put Spin On Grow Op Busts Drug squad head Sgt. Tim Shields of the Kelowna RCMP spent a considerable part of a media briefing yesterday trying to convince reporters of a stand the force has taken often in the past: The majority of marijuana grow operations are connected to organized crime and that the dope they grow is smuggled into the U.S. and comes back as cocaine.
During Green Team raids on 23 large grow houses, Shields said police seized 10,500 plants, enough by their calculations to provide every teenaged kid in the Central Okanagan school district with a joint a day for 429 days.
But what about the obvious disparity? If the pot is all going south for cocaine, how is it that the same dope can also supply our kids for over a year?
[ Kudos to this newspaper for not accepting the police PR at face value... if all media did this, peraps the drug war would be over.] |
| Nov 24, 2006 | Baby Boom Pot Smokers' Principles Up In Smoke Weekly, in this city and across Canada, marijuana grow house operations are busted; kids are arrested in parks as they smoke grass -- the war on "drugs" marches on. So lucrative is the business of selling marijuana that drug dealers kill each other to stay on top, often also killing or maiming innocent bystanders in the process.
And in the midst of all this, on any given Saturday night, the elite of this country -- including doctors, lawyers and journalists -- puff away on marijuana and sip red wine as they exchange pleasant conversation at dinner parties. Anything wrong with this picture?
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| Nov 16, 2006 | Stoned By Jury ury nullification ( when a jury goes against the law or a judge's instructions ) is alive and well in Canada. With jury deliberations shrouded in secrecy, a jury always has the implied power and ability to ignore the law and decide a case in accordance with its moral intuition....
For the most part, Canadians do not respect laws that stand in the way of relieving pain and suffering. This is why the Krieger jury had difficulty convicting in the face of clear technical guilt. So when I am asked about the legal status of the centres, I usually mumble something like "probably illegal but non-prosecutable."
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| Nov 2, 2006 | 93% Of Canadians Okay With Medicinal Pot Nearly Half Back Full Legalization; Support Is Highest In Quebec And B.C.
In a nationwide survey, an overwhelming 93 per cent of Canadians indicated they accept the idea of people legally smoking marijuana for health reasons.
Nearly three in four ( 70 per cent ) not only accept the practice but also personally approve of the behaviour.
[ Not much has changed in six years - (See: 2000 Survey ) - Support still runs in the 90+ percentile for medpot, and the government still does nothing ] |
| Oct 10, 2006 | Man Says Hemp Oil Cured His Cancer "The attention to this story is going across Canada and that means people will find out about this hemp oil and what it can do to save lives," Mr. Dwyer said Sunday.
He was referring to an essential oil a local man produces from the buds and leaves of the hemp plant.
Mr. Dwyer, a past president of the Maccan legion, and other executive members got into a spot of trouble with the Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command of the Royal Canadian Legion because of the oil.
"I did research for over a year and a half, I spoke to at least 30 people with diseases like cancer and diabetes wounds who were cured by this oil, and I felt we had a duty to make sure people knew of this," he said. ...."It cured my sister's cancer and my wife's arthritis - she was taking medicine and was still in horrible pain for 13 years - this oil is amazing," said Mr. Dwyer, 51.
"My father, who is 82 years old, was given 48 hours to live because of his cancer and that was in June - I took him off all his medicines and gave him this oil and he's cured."
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| Oct 5, 2006 | US CO: Hippie-Hating And -Baiting Possession of an ounce of marijuana by adults will be legal if Colorado's Amendment 44 wins. ... Amendment 44 is about more than marijuana: It's about civil rights and America's future.
"Yeah, the '60s are over with," the man growls, "but they forgot to tell them that up in Boulder." Or, apparently, in a good portion of Colorado. Today, hippies aren't supposed to exist; yet, look around, and there they are, the majority of whom had yet to be born when the '60s ended. I'd estimate that nationally, hippies comprise about 10 percent of the population; in Colorado, that figure is probably higher.
We tend to recite the cliche that hippies no longer exist because powerful forces in America want us to think just that. They consider the counterculture a menace to Western civilization, something with no rightful place in today's America.
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| Oct 5, 2006 | Column: Harper's No Sage Socrates believed that the unexamined life is not worth living, and last week's budget cuts by the Harper government to the Law Commission of Canada, the Court Challenges Program and the medical marijuana research fund show that this administration is committed to unexamined ignorance in governance. I may not be interested in having philosopher kings run this country, but it would be nice if those in power at least had the desire to develop public policy based on information, debate and analysis.
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| Sep 28, 2006 | Column: RCMP Must Be Independent Of Politics n the end, what saved the Mounties was dope. Canada was just getting into the swing of the drug prohibition business, and Parliament ultimately decided that a national presence was necessary to effectively enforce the Opium and Drug Act. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was born, and today employs 60,000 men and women. That crucial role of drugs in the history of the RCMP is important when trying to make sense of some of the more intriguing actions on the part of its high-level decision-makers over the past couple of years.
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| Aug 30, 2006 | RCMP Retract 'Pound For Pound' Assertion Police made an honest mistake by telling The Reminder that marijuana is sometimes traded pound for pound with cocaine, according to the RCMP National Headquarters.
Paul Nadeau, the Mounties' national drug enforcement director, said police have no evidence to support this recently-reported "urban myth."
"Personally, I have never heard of one instance where we've been able to corroborate that," he said from his Ottawa office.
Nadeau said the fallacy is so widespread that it's believed by criminals, lawyers and some of the many thousands of police officers - -- RCMP and otherwise -- across the nation....The pound-for-pound statement was included as part of an Aug. 9 Reminder article outlining how today's marijuana is much more potent - -- and of greater concern to police -- than the pot of yesteryear.
Within days of the story running, members of the pro-marijuana lobby from across Canada fired off e-mails and letters to the editor ridiculing the claim. They read the article online.
Police propaganda gets trounced - thanks to the efforts of many letter writers. It would be so much easier to separate fact from fiction if all media followed up on the dubious claims of reefer madness spewed into the "news", and got retractions from police and politicians. |
| Feb 28, 2006 | War On Drugs A Joke To Ex-Cop In Norm Stamper's world, the "drug store" is a place that is much different from what generally comes to mind.
The 28-year police veteran of the San Diego police department and former Seattle police chief wants to see all street drugs legalized, firmly regulated and sold just like we sell alcohol today.
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| Jan 16, 2006 | Apocalypse Now! A Conservative Canada? Pot people in Canada face extreme danger if a Conservative Justice Minister and the Conservative Party win on January 23rd
The Conservative Party say they will give any Canadians caught selling more than 3 kilograms of marijuana a mandatory 24 months minimum in jail. The Conservatives, who lead the polls in Canada’s general election for next Monday, January 23, have already indicated they want mandatory jail terms for any Canadian growing marijuana.
They promised never to decriminalize marijuana.
[ Also see:
The swell of opposition to rightwingnuts ruling us is beginning to grow! Voters are shaking the amnesia and remembering Brian Mulroney, Mike Harris and their kind. |
| Jan 12, 2006 | Activist Takes Pot Law To Top Court Test of rare defence seeking 'jury nullification';
Although judges are supposed to encourage jurors to stick to the letter of the law, Krieger's lawyer, John Hook, argues the Supreme Court formally recognized jury nullification in the 1988 acquittal of abortion doctor Henry Morgentaler.
At the time, the bench described the jury's power as "the citizen's ultimate protection against oppressive laws and the oppressive enforcement of the law."
[ Usually we don't hear about SCC decisions for at least six months after the hearing.] |
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